If you want to better understand why peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a hopeless illusion, read Raja Shehadeh’s response in the Aug. 26 New York Times to Yossi Klein Halevi’s soulful and conciliatory book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.”
Instead of responding in kind, Shehadeh falls back on the tired trope of chronic victimhood that has served only to perpetuate Palestinian misery. In this narrow view, every Palestinian woe is Israel’s fault, and Palestinians are a weak people with no agency just waiting for big, bad Israel to “withdraw from the territories it has occupied and leave us to go on with our lives.”
Shehadeh, who’s an author and an intellectual, knows better than to simplify such a bedeviling conflict whose complexity Halevi tried to honor. He knows, for example, that after the Israel Defense Forces would abandon the territories, terror groups like Hamas and ISIS would love nothing more than to fill the vacuum and massacre Palestinians, just as Hamas did in Gaza.
But such complexity plays no role in Shehadeh’s takedown of Halevi’s good faith offer to embark “on a journey of listening to each other.” When all you can see is your own victimhood, there’s no need to listen, even as a gesture of reciprocation.
Shehadeh admits that Halevi recognizes the importance of a Palestinian “counterstory,” one of “invasion, occupation and expulsion,” a history of “dislocation” and “humiliating defeats.” But how does he respond to such humility and contrition? By blasting Halevi for being “condescending” and for focusing so much of his book on trying to help Palestinians understand the Zionist story that is ingrained in Halevi’s soul, which was the very purpose of the book.
Shehadeh also knows better than to casually dismiss Israeli peace offers that were rejected by Palestinians as “old and discredited narratives.” He can’t even bring himself to acknowledge that Palestinians are partly responsible for the absence of peace. The furthest he will go is to say, “I was involved in the Oslo negotiations and I can tell you that Israel shares plenty of responsibility for their failure.”
Everything else in his piece is a hodgepodge of polite aggression disguised as sophisticated lamentations. He claims, “To make peace possible the Palestinians are not required to become Zionists,” as if Halevi ever asked for that. Betraying his intent to undermine Halevi’s book, he twists a plea to “understand us” into a demand to “become Zionist.”
Perhaps the deepest sign of his cynicism and distancing is when he confesses to having zero interest in Israelis understanding his narrative. “Unlike you,” he writes triumphantly, “I will not demand that you see the Nakba, the catastrophe that Israel’s founding caused for my people, in the same way as I see it.”
Why? Because “You couldn’t,” he tells Halevi. Shehadeh is so drenched in smug victimhood that he can’t possibly imagine a Jewish neighbor being able to understand his narrative — not even a neighbor who has already made a genuine effort to do precisely that.
Responding to Shehadeh on Facebook, Halevi continued to show his good faith, writing, “I choose to take your response as a potential opening” and “I am prepared to stand with you, Raja, on any platform, before any audience, and affirm the basic principles of mutual respect and recognition that would lead to an end to the occupation and the acceptance of Israel.”
Will Shehadeh take him up on the offer? We’ll see.
In the meantime, Shehadeh wants Israel to recognize its responsibility and “put a recognition of that culpability on the agenda for negotiations when the time comes for arriving at a settlement between us.”
When the time comes? That time will never come if the Shehadehs of the Palestinian and humanitarian world continue to treat Palestinians as hopeless victims who are too weak to ever understand the authentic and eternal longings of their Jewish neighbors.
When an Olive Branch Gets Rejected : https://ift.tt/2MBudXw
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